Talking with Furniture: Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction from Keyhole Press. His fiction has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Unsaid, and Ninth Letter, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. He is also the editor of The Collagist and can be found online at www.mdbell.com.

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UF Review: Your new collection, How They Were Found, is getting stellar reviews. How would you describe your book? What do you like about short stories?

Bell: How They Were Found is a collection
of thirteen stories, about a variety of characters: A cartographer
making maps of a city that doesn’t quite exist, a military commander
overseeing an arctic communications tower, a 19th-century preacher
building a mechanical messiah, and so on. There’s a woman who finds a
miniature doppelganger of her ex-boyfriend, and another who imagines the
child growing inside her as a series of objects and animals. I recently
told a reader in a Q&A that many of the stories begin with the
protagonist taking on some new role — becoming a detective, say, or a
father or a mother — and that the stories then becomes about their
completion or exhaustion of that roles. That’s as good a description as
any, I think, of what holds the stories together.

As for what I like about short stories: I don’t think there’s
anything I don’t like. I think the short story is such an incredibly
elastic and powerful form, able to hold so many different kinds of
narratives and aesthetics. It’s really a phenomenal genre to write and
to read, and I feel lucky to get to spend so much of my time as a writer
and an editor and teacher working inside of it.

UF Review: Please talk about your previous work. Does one project lead to the other? Is there conversation between, say, The Collectors and How They Were Found? For you, how does one project end and another begin?

Bell: While I was writing the stories that would become How They Were Found —
which included “The Collectors” — I found that I was carrying a lot
over from one story to the next. There would be some stylistic or
thematic element that would crossover into part of the next story,
without exactly repeating or dominating the newer one. I think that
actually helped the book hold together as a whole: That kind of
crossover creates all kinds of little links throughout the book,
especially since the stories aren’t ordered as they were written
chronologically. That’s also how I knew when I was finishing the book: I
started writing stories that didn’t have those links, that didn’t fit
well with what had come before.

UF Review: I know it’s hard for writers to pick
favorites, but I know sometimes authors write a story they’re
particularly invested in and then say to themselves, “Man, can’t do
better than that.” Has that ever happened to you? How do you overcome
that feeling?

Bell: That’s an interesting thing to feel, but
I don’t know if I’ve felt exactly that myself. The goal is always to do
the best thing I can do right now, and then to do something better. To
me, there’s no point in just publishing stories and books, if they’re
not going to be continually going after I haven’t done yet. I realize
that — inevitably — there are going to be some stories and books that
stand out above others, given a long enough view of my career, but for
myself, in the moment, I’ve got to always believe I’m doing better than I
have before.

UF Review: Your fiction is really exciting and in
some ways, I think, innovative. What does your writing process look
like? What about your revision process?

Bell: I generally write in the morning, every day,
for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, there’s nothing too exciting about
it: I tend to work for about three hours, listening to music if I’m
drafting, or reading aloud if I’m rewriting. I tend to draft by going
forward as often as possible, working sentence to sentence, and when I
get stuck I take a big step back, maybe five or ten or twenty pages, and
then rewrite forward again until I reach the end, where hopefully I’ll
have a better idea of what to do next. If I don’t I back up and try
again, and again, and again, until either I figure it out or I have to
put the piece aside.

UF Review: Why do you dedicate yourself to fiction? What do you love about writing? What do you dislike?

Bell: It’s so hard to pick a favorite thing about
writing: I really do love almost all of it, from the large-scale
invention to discovering a nice bit of acoustics in a sentence, from
getting to know a character to the particulars of grammar and
linguistics. It’s all of great interest to me, and all enjoyable and
entertaining. Of course, the flipsides of all those coins can be all
kinds of irritating and painful, but that’s part of the process. Maybe
the worst thing is that, after all the work on my end is done, there’s
no guarantee it’ll reach the right readers, due to all kinds of
uncertainties that are part of the publishing process. That said, that’s
just part of the insecurity that goes with any job: We all want to make
a difference, and we worry we won’t. I just try to believe that if I
keep doing better and better work, the writing will keep getting noticed
by the people who need it. That’s enough.

UF Review: You’re an editor of a pretty reputable magazine, The Collagist. How does being an editor help you with your writing process?

Bell: I think it’s very easy to grow as a writer
while editing a lot of other people’s work, partly just because the
problems — and the solutions — are often easier to see in other people’s
writing. So that’s a nice benefit. The other is that when you read a
couple hundred submissions a month, you get a really good idea of what
people are doing in contemporary literature, what fads and trends and so
on appear in their stories, and then — if you’re like me — you try to
avoid doing those things. What’s the point in being able to do something
everyone else can too? Better to go after the parts of your writing
that are the most unique. Reading submissions can help you find those
things by comparison, I think.

UF Review: What are some of your favorite literary venues to read? What are some of your favorite books? Favorite authors?

Bell: There are dozens and dozens of magazines I love, but a couple of my favorites include Conjunctions, Unsaid, Willow Springs, Hobart, and Annalemma, in print, and then Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, DIAGRAM, and PANK
online. Of course, that’s just the beginning: I think there are more
magazines of great worth now than maybe ever before, and I could go on
and on. Probably the same thing is true about books, but some of my
favorite writers would have to include Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy,
Michael Kimball, Robert Lopez, Amelia Gray, Christine Schutt… I could go
and on. One of the best books I’ve read this year is Tina May
Hall’s The Physics of Imaginary Objects, which I can’t recommend enough, and Kimball’s How Much of Us There Was, which will be out next year from Tyrant Books, should be on everyone’s must-read list.

UF Review: Please talk about your journey as a
writer. You seem to have risen through the ranks by working with
independent presses. What do you like about independent presses? What
don’t you like?

Bell: I love the independent presses: They produce
most of the American fiction and poetry I’m really excited about, and
that’s why I wanted my own books to come out on indie presses. I think
the indies are capable of accomplishing much that commercial presses
aren’t, because of their size and speed, and I think they tend to be
more open aesthetically, because they are — and I realize these are
broad, somewhat gross generalizations — they have a little less
obligation to the marketplace. That said, the independent presses have a
hard road to travel sometimes. I’ve talked a lot in the past about the
potential for the indies to be the true heart of American publishing,
but for the larger public to acknowledge that, the indie presses have to
be better in every way than the commercial houses are: Better writing,
better design, online better marketing, better service, and so on. And
clearly that’s not the case everywhere, but the internet and the access
to pro-grade design software and so on has really made it much more
possible, and there are certainly some indie presses that I think are
succeeding on every level. I’ve got a lot of hope for the next ten years
or so, and I’m curious to see how it all turns out.

UF Review: Where do you want to go as a writer? What’s next? Any upcoming projects?

Bell: I’ve got a second book-length manuscript
finished, and am rewriting a novel right now, so hopefully that will
eventually become the third book. Other than that, I just want to keep
making it to the chair every day, keep pushing myself as a reader and a
writer and an editor.

UF Review: As a writer, what are you most thankful for?

Bell: “Most” is tough, but here’s one thing: When I
was a kid, and I went shopping with my parents, we weren’t often allowed
to buy toys or candy or any of the stuff kids always want (although of
course we did sometimes get those things). What we were always allowed
to get was a new book, and so we almost always did, and the end result
is that everyone in my family is a reader. If I hadn’t read all those
books as a kid, I don’t think I would have ever ended up here. It’s not
like the kind of thing you discover late, or at least it doesn’t seem so
to me. I don’t necessarily remember all the particulars of those early
books, but I know I’m glad I got them, and if my parents hadn’t seen the
value in that, then I wouldn’t be a writer.

UF Review: And oh, I almost forgot, a question I always love to ask: does writing inform your life or does life inform your writing?

Bell: It’s both, of course. The writing is part of
the daily practice of living: It’s the first thing I do almost every day
when I wake up, and reading is often the last thing I do before I go to
bed. Similarly, one of the hallmarks of a good book is that when you
get done reading it, you’re changed in some way, and I think that one
sign that you might have written such a thing is that it changed you in
the writing: It’s a beautiful thing to finish a book or a story or a
paragraph or a sentence and realize that you’re not going to be the same
person now, not exactly. By the act of writing, you’ve changed
something about yourself, and there’s no going back now. That’s what I
want, every single day: To slowly, by the writing of fiction, to become
not just a better artist but a better human being. That’s what makes it
worth doing, worth all the time and energy and effort. To do it for any
other reason would be a waste.